The Widower's Tale

by Julia Glass

  I rushed into my clothes and out the front door with my daughters. My head pounded as I made the drive to Ledgely without coffee, so after leaving Trudy and Clover at the courts, I drove to the Narwhal and begged a cup from Norval. In lulls between customers, we talked about the disastrous end to the dinner party. Perhaps we were a righteous lot. But then of course we rehashed our indignation over national affairs. We debated the pros and cons of Jimmy Carter. Poppy did not like the way he mentioned God so much. “Church. State,” she’d say, making a vertical slash with one hand between the two words. “He’s a good man, genuinely pious, but he’s opening the door to a world of trouble.”

  I stayed with Norval long enough to pick up the girls at the end of their lessons without having gone back to Matlock.

  When the three of us entered the house, I noticed that dishes from the party still lay about the kitchen, exactly as I’d left them the night before.

  “Hey, Mom!” Clover yelled as she tossed her tennis racket onto the table. Normally, Poppy would have been making them lunch. “Hey, Mom, where are you? We’re starving here!”

  I was about to reprimand Clover for not putting her racket away when Trudy said, “Look, Dad, is that a swan?”

  I followed her gaze out the window and, for the briefest moment, laughed. Trudy might need glasses, I was thinking as I saw quite clearly, with my excellent vision, that the white mass at the edge of the pond was Poppy’s new Moroccan dress.

  Perhaps at that very moment, the Minkoffs, who lived in one of the Three Greeks on the other side of the pond, were watching a policeman cover Poppy’s body with a sheet. I did not witness this horrendous scene myself, but my imagination has had so much time to construct it that sometimes I’m convinced I was the one to find her.

  Simultaneously, a police car was turning down my driveway. From the kitchen, I could not see this, either, but when I heard the doorbell, already I knew that something was urgently wrong. I forced the girls to go to their rooms before I answered the door. I remember saying to them, “Go! Now! Please!” They must have thought I’d gone mad.

  I did not admit the young policeman but walked swiftly from the house and led him halfway across the lawn, nearly dragging him by an arm. That he allowed me to do so was, I knew before he spoke, a very bad sign.

  In short order, I returned inside and called upstairs that Clover and Trudy should stay there until I came back.

  “Jesus, Dad, what’s going on?” Clover called down.

  “Just stay,” I called back. Two words—two syllables—that I knew, even then, would have made all the difference in the world had I spoken them to Poppy, twelve hours earlier, instead.

  The policeman drove the circuitous looping of country lanes that took us to the opposite side of the pond. We did not speak.

  An ambulance was parked in the middle of the Minkoffs’ lawn. This was an absurd sight. Beside it stood two men in white uniforms, facing the pond. Their arms were folded. Why did they look so relaxed? Beyond them, men in darker uniforms walked back and forth by the water.

  Saul and Linda Minkoff stood on their porch, watching the various men on the lawn as if they were actors in a play. When I got out of the police car, they went inside. They were neighbors I did not know well, because the pond, like a small ocean, kept us apart. I recognized them from town meetings and the grocery store.

  Poppy’s naked body had lodged in the cattails. Like me, the Minkoffs respected the pond’s varied wildlife and did not mow to the water’s edge.

  What flashed in my head was an illustration in a collection of fairy tales I had bought for Clover and Trudy, years ago, at the Narwhal. In the tale “Binnorie,” a treacherous girl drowns her sister in order to marry the sister’s sweetheart, and a traveling minstrel makes a harp of the dead girl’s breastbone and hair. He travels by happenstance to the castle of the evil sister, where the harp, laid aside on a shelf, sings a ballad about the betrayal. Both girls found this story too frightening, so I would page past it. Yet my eyes sometimes lingered on the painting of the maiden lying drowned on the banks of the milldam, golden tresses wound through stalks of grass.

  Half covered with a sheet, Poppy lay before me like a flesh-and-blood forgery of that illustration.

  “That’s my wife,” I said stupidly as I joined the men who already knew this fact. As I have said, ours was such a small town. These young policemen had waved to Poppy when she rode her bike along our safe, pretty roads. Perhaps one or two of them had been among those who had given her warnings, never tickets, about the speed at which she drove.

  One of these fellows asked if I wanted them to call someone. I asked them to call Helena. Understandably, but idiotically, I did not want to leave Poppy, so it was Helena who went to the house and told my daughters their mother was dead. As if hypnotized, I spent the afternoon dealing, almost calmly, with the police and their meek, provincial inquiries. By the time I arrived at home, several cars lined the driveway. I found Clover and Trudy at the kitchen table, Norval and Helena sitting close beside them. Helena—or someone, I never asked who—had cleaned and put away every dish from the party.

  I was in Packard already that Sunday, at my favorite hardware store, throwback to one of those charming Robert McCloskey books I read to the girls when they were small. The warped wood floor wears a scatter of sawdust, ancient dusty tools and coils of rope hang from the rafters, and a freckled blond boy leaps to attention when you enter. He even calls you sir. (I like to believe that it will remain exactly so until the glaciers have melted away.)

  I’d bought a special kind of oil I use for my rotary mower and picked up a few rolls of tape. On the way out, I bought an Eskimo Pie from the freezer (a clever source of bribes for impatient children, sheer indulgence for me). I was heading for my car when I saw the orange banner on the old mill, gussied up and spared from collapse, that now houses artists and a few craft boutiques. OPEN STUDIOS.

  Well why not? I placed my purchases on the backseat of my car. I didn’t even have to feed the meter.

  The cavernous halls of the brick building were chilly as I wandered past the open doorways, each leading to a cornucopia of chandeliers, charm bracelets, tapestries, or some other form of elaborately creative effulgence. I tried to fool myself into believing that I was there to browse. I waved awkwardly at lonely artisans hoping for someone, anyone, to look at their frivolous wares. On the third floor, I found her.

  I saw a plaque with her name, Sarah Straight, before I was able to look through the open door. Too late, I panicked at the thought that her work might be trivial, tacky, or downright ugly. What would I say? I’ve never been good at pretending I like what I most emphatically do not.

  A slim shaft of violet light crossed the threshold, like a stray laser beam. I stepped into it and was, for a moment, blinded. Stepping aside, I saw the source of the purple ray: a large fan window that depicted, in brilliant, varicolored, varitextured fragments of glass, a landscape. A seascape, to be precise: marbled rough-hewn slabs of rock against a wide blue turmoil of sea, a stormy sky. The low afternoon sun was shining right through it.

  “Percival Darling!” She’d spotted me before I spotted her.

  Two other people stood nearby, Sunday strangers admiring Sarah’s work.

  She crossed the space between us, her hand held out. As I shook it, I realized that my own hand was sticky. “Oh dear,” I said. “Eskimo Pie.”

  “Sticky hands I’m used to,” said Sarah. As if on cue, Rico streaked past, riding a tricycle across the concrete floor.

  “Please don’t go anywhere,” she said. “I mean it. Look around, or sit, help yourself to food over there. Just give me a few minutes with these people.” She whispered, “I think they might give me a commission.”

  So I looked while Sarah had a quiet conversation with one of the strangers. Her windows were landscapes, all devoutly New England in their images and tone: autumnal hay fields, snow-laden pines, islands off the coast of Maine. I saw her writing in a notebook, giving a
card to the man, shaking his hand. When he left, she returned to me.

  “How nice to see you.”

  I laughed inanely. “I was across the street, at Conley’s. I’ve been going there since …” I skidded to a halt. It was clear to me that I did not want to tell her how many years I’d been shopping in Packard—shopping anywhere at all.

  “Isn’t Packard fabulous?” she said. “Last year one of my friends got a loft in this building and we came for a visit.”

  I found fabulous a curious word to apply to this rundown corner of the world, but I hastened to agree.

  A bell, like a school bell, rang from below. “Is that a fire alarm?”

  “No. Studios close in fifteen minutes,” Sarah explained. “But stay; would you stay for a bit? The fruit and cheese shouldn’t go to waste.” She pointed to an arrangement of plates on a table, next to a pair of wine bottles, both empty.

  “What if I were to say I’d rather have the wine?” I cringed to hear myself sounding so coy.

  Sarah laughed. (How readily this woman laughed!) She said quietly, “I have a much nicer bottle in the back that I’d never share with just anyone.”

  “Thank you!” called out the straggler. “Your work is amazing!”

  “Come back anytime,” Sarah said. She crossed the loft and locked the door behind him. She closed her eyes and leaned against it. “These afternoons take a lot out of me.”

  “But you must enjoy sharing your work.” I looked around. “Your quite impressive work.” Your breathtaking work, I wasn’t brave enough to say.

  Sarah had stepped behind a curtain at the end of the wide-open studio space. She emerged carrying a bottle of wine and two colorful handmade glasses. “I’m glad you like it. Rumor has it your praise isn’t easy to earn.”

  She set down the glasses and started to open the bottle.

  “Oh dear. I was joking about the wine,” I said.

  Rico shot past us again, imitating a police siren.

  “No!” I exclaimed when I saw that I’d embarrassed her. “What I mean is that I’d love to linger a bit—and I’ll help myself to that Brie, since my daughter’s not here to take it away—but I can’t drive home if I drink. I’m very careful that way.” She stood still, listening to me. Was she waiting for something?

  “And surely you’ll want to get back to your husband soon,” I said.

  “There is no husband. Thank heaven. As for ‘getting back,’ we live right here, Rico and I.” She pointed at the curtain. “That’s our lair. I’d show it to you, but it’s all topsy-turvy right now.”

  “Topsy-turvy,” I echoed vaguely.

  Rico dismounted his make-believe cruiser and marched up to the table. He grabbed the largest bunch of grapes he could engulf in a fist and, while stuffing his small face, declared loudly and redundantly that he was hungry.

  “Oh bunny, you didn’t get lunch, did you?” His mother looked at her watch. I was prepared to be dismissed when she said, “How would you feel about an unfashionably early dinner at an unfashionably kid-friendly restaurant, Percy? May I call you Percy?”

  “Of course!” I said. There were times when I embraced my elder status. This was not one of those times.

  The next two hours, which the three of us spent in Packard’s oldest eating establishment, a diner whose charming exterior belies its leaden, rather Paleolithic offerings, felt utterly bizarre yet utterly thrilling to me. Sarah, I learned in the harsh light of Mama Jo’s, was neither as young as I had guessed nor as saintly as she seemed. She was fifty-one; had been married, young and briefly; had fled to France for several years, where she’d studied glass with “the masters”; had returned to the States and “run wild.” (I asked for details about the masters but not the running wild.) Four years ago, on her own, she had adopted Rico in Guatemala. “I made a lot of mistakes,” she said, “and then this little boy just up and saved my life. Tied me down. Which I used to think would kill me. And was I wrong.” She mussed his hair, and I could tell he had heard this speech before, since it did not disrupt his confounding enjoyment of a hamburger that looked like a disk of macadam between two slabs of toasted Styrofoam.

  The two of them shared an enormous hot-fudge sundae—a dessert that’s hard to ruin.

  “Tell Mr. Darling what you’re going to be for Halloween,” she said when they had finished sparring for the last glob of fudge at the bottom of the dish.

  “I am going to be the Grim Reaper,” said Rico.

  “Oh my,” I said. “With a scythe and a great black hood?”

  “Yes, a scythe. Mom knows how to make one.”

  “A homemade scythe,” I said, honestly impressed. “Well, please do not darken my door, young fellow.”

  Rico looked at his mother. She said, “Can we promise him that, Rico? I don’t think so. The Grim Reaper visits everyone.” She looked at me and began to chuckle maniacally. Rico looked confused.

  I walked them back. I insisted on seeing them to the door of the loft.

  “That was fun, Percy.”

  “Yes, it was.” I’d meant to direct this remark at Rico, but he had run off already. I said good night.

  In the dark, I drove to Matlock feeling as if I’d drunk that wine after all, the entire bottle, though all I’d imbibed was a glass of water and a cup of coffee that tasted as if it had been brewed sometime during the Reagan administration.

  A few days later, I found myself furtively watching for Sarah as the Lunch Bunch spilled out of the barn. When I saw her leaving with Rico, I stepped outside, pretending to inspect the tree house. It wasn’t quite finished, but Ira had hung from the lower framework a string of orange lights for Halloween. The visible parts of the tree house were being constructed with limbs pillaged—or pruned—from other trees: I recognized birch and sycamore among them. (Ira had made a habit of checking in with me after every sprint of progress on his project. He was never the least bit obsequious, and I had the feeling that if I’d told him I wished it would resemble a mosque or a burlesque hall, he’d have done his best to comply. I had also noticed, from glances out my back windows and remarks dropped into Clover’s cheerful chitchat, that he and my daughter were becoming friends. Oh please not more than that, I begged the parental gods. Nothing personal against the talented pixie.)

  I hailed Rico and asked him if he was in one of the groups entrusted with decorating the tree house. As luck would have it, he was; I drew him out about the furnishings he and his classmates were hammering together in the wood shop.

  And then, as clumsily as one can possibly imagine, I turned to Sarah and said, “Would the two of you like to come for dinner sometime?”

  Rico, whom I’d managed to interrupt, was still talking about the table they were making with Mr. Ira, how it would be painted in all the colors of the rainbow. Sarah stared at me so fixedly that I knew she must be struggling with how to decline my invitation.

  “Excuse me for just a second,” she said to Rico. To me, she said, “Yes. When?”

  “Oh.” I hadn’t planned what to say if she accepted.

  The day before Poppy’s funeral, I kicked everyone out of the house: her parents, who’d flown in from France and were staying at the Ledgely Inn; my widowed mother, whom I banished to the Sorensons; and even Helena, who’d spent three nights on the fold-out couch in my study to be with the girls while I made arrangements. I had come downstairs that morning to find the two older women and Helena cleaning my kitchen and murmuring sadly among themselves. Poppy had been dead for four days. I heard our daughters’ names on these women’s lips.

  When the three women looked up at me in unison, I was struck with a manic vertigo, the specific fear that someone, somehow, would take Clover and Trudy away from me, too. Before my eyes, my mother, mother-in-law, and wife’s best friend became my adversaries. Their presence felt not the least bit consoling; it was stifling, suffocating, cunning, a covert invasion. I was on the verge of hysteria. My voice shook as I said, without greeting them, “By lunchtime, I require you all to
leave. I wish to be alone with my daughters. Please.”

  None of them had argued. After breakfast, they made a rich, nurturing lunch (I remember Helena’s ice-cold watercress soup) and set the table for three. They hugged the girls, one by one, as if in a reception line, and they drove away.

  We shared lunch in perfect, heartbroken silence. Trudy and I ate almost nothing; Clover ate two bowls of soup, much of the cheese, and devoured the entire loaf of bread. I had meant it when I said that I wanted to be with my daughters, unchaperoned, but after lunch they went upstairs, into Clover’s room, and closed the door. It seemed clear they did not want my company, so I lay down on my bed, on Poppy’s bed, feeling no purpose, no sense of time. I could hear Clover and Trudy together at their end of the second floor, speaking in low voices. The phone rang only a few times; every time, Clover ran downstairs to answer it. The first time, she came to the door of the bedroom, which I had left ajar. I’m sure she could see that I’d been crying, though she did not offer to enter the room or comfort me. I told her that unless the funeral director or the minister called, I wasn’t available. Although we’d made a will, Poppy had left no directions about rituals in the event of her death. I buckled, without protest, when her parents requested a service in Matlock’s Episcopal church, though we agreed on cremation. Her ashes would be buried an hour north, in Vigil Harbor, in the graveyard where her father’s ancestors lay and her parents intended to wind up their days.

  I must have fallen asleep before dinnertime; I slept until the following morning.

  What a beautiful day it was: dry, almost cool, the birds singing their tiny lungs out in the trees around the house. I awoke without so much as a single merciful moment of amnesia. My eyes were still swollen, and I was fiercely thirsty. In the kitchen, I was stunned to find Trudy and Clover, sitting at the table eating breakfast, both dressed in black, hair studiously combed. Clover wore lipstick. Towering above their heads, in the center of the table, was one of the many flower arrangements that would not stop arriving.